For months Tesla CEO Elon Musk has subtly (and not so subtly) hinted that the company’s next big foray wouldn’t be another car, but a battery system aimed at homeowners, businesses and utilities. On Thursday night, he finally made the announcement most of us saw coming. [More]

Americans own a lot of stuff, and we don’t like to get rid of it. While it’s admirable to keep your old things in place of replacing them with new things, that is not exactly what we’re doing. The growth of the self-storage industry tells us that what we’re actually doing is packing away the items we can’t bear to part with but don’t want to trip over on a daily basis. [More]

Here at Consumerist, we like to think optimistically — despite the feeling that winter has always been here and is going to stretch on into eternity, it’s got to end sometime. In the spirit of forward-thinking, now’s a good time to start planning for that gleeful day when you pack up your sweaters, scarves and warm woolens for at least a few months. [More]

Brian moved away from the United States five years ago. When he first headed to Brazil, he didn’t plan to be away for quite this long, and had some items in storage. He paid a friend to fetch his belongings from the storage facility, which is in a different state from Brian’s family and permanent address. The company had changed hands a few times in the last few years, but he didn’t expect them to be so disorganized that they would have no idea that his friend was coming. He wants the storage company to compensate him in some way for having to pay his friend for an extra day on the road. Should they? [More]

If you keep large quantities of food on hand, it’s important to cycle through it — replacing it with recently-bought supplies — in order not to let the grub spoil. But nonperishable staples don’t always come with expiration dates. And even if they do, you might have lost the dates if you transferred the food to your own containers. [More]

Nailing paint cans to your wall is not necessarily a sign that you’re suffering mental confusion or own an Applebee’s. Thanks to their storage capacity, cans tend to make better coat hooks than coat hooks themselves, argues Instructables. [More]

The NYT has a 6-page story about the self-storage phenomenon, the effect of which was to make us grateful for the internet because were we to have to physically store these NYT Magazine features we’d be destitute. In any case, its an interesting article. If you’ve ever wondered what people were doing with all the crap they were buying in the last decade — well, a lot of it ended up in storage.

U-Haul apparently knows about Ryder’s initiative to outdo it on suckage, so they’ve introduced a whole new class of customer abuse: false imprisonment. Best of all, the employee who was sent to let Jessica and her friend out of U-Haul Prison told them that if they hadn’t wanted to get locked in after 5pm, they should have paid for 24 hour access. (They were taking advantage of a complimentary offer from the company.)

Matt and his family used the portable storage company PODS for their recent move. The company rents you a storage container, then stores it or moves it around on a truck for you. Their system sounded pretty great, but then things started to go wrong. Very, very wrong. What followed was a tale of broken promises, underestimations, and their belongings being held by the police (!) that would put fear into the heart of any person planning a move.

When you rent a storage unit, you do so with the assumption that the company in charge won’t let a family of raccoons move in and destroy or urinate on all of your belongings. The La Gambina family of Illinois thought so, at least, but they were quite wrong.

We recently trashed Kodak Gallery, and rightly so, for providing the least value of any online photo storage/printing service. Now we take that back, because with a simple change to their terms, they’ve suddenly become a viable choice again—provided you meet a couple of conditions.

Kyle wrote in looking for advice after a storage company disappeared with everything they owned: Short story: We had 8160 pounds of personal items in storage with Wright Way Moving & Storage of Kent, Washington (not a self-storage place, a pallet-style warehouse storage place).

Where would we be without photos? We’d have no blackmail, no things to cut up after a divorce, no US Weekly, and no pictures to stare at on The Consumerist. And now that there are digital cameras, anyone can take ’em. But like emails, thesis statements, and that Great American Novel you’ve been working on for years, they’re prone to digital oblivion if you don’t take some precautions. The Associated Press has four basic tips that you should already be following to keep your digital pics safe.